Helen Wickes: "I was making a verbal postcard"

Helen Wickes' poem "Postcard From Venice" appeared in the July issue of The Collagist. She lives in Oakland, California, where she worked for many years as a psychotherapist. Her first book of poems, In Search of Landscape, was published in 2007 by Sixteen Rivers Press, a shared work, non-profit small poetry press in the Bay Area. Her poem, “Postcard from Venice” is part of an unpublished manuscript called Wait for Me. 

Can you talk about the inspiration for "Postcard From Venice"? What was on your mind while you were writing this poem?

I was in Venice, missing my parents who had died in recent years. In the opening stanza, I’m also addressing all the loved people who died in a short number of years, wondering if they were listening, if they were out there. It was the first time I’d been out of the country for years. I’d spent years flying back and forth from California to Pennsylvania to deal with ailing relatives, and then they’re gone, and I’m far from home, thinking, remembering, and trying to stay in the eternal present.

I love how the ending couplet kind of erases, in a way, what we’ve just read, this “Postcard from Venice.” How did you see the title and the ending couplet negotiating one another?

I was thinking about how people don’t send postcards any more. They send an email or put something on facebook, so I was making a verbal postcard. At the end, I get back to that opening stanza, in which I’m missing the dead loved ones, wanting to tell them about life, how short it is, how much I miss them.

The image of Jesus, his life, and his suffering on the cross is a familiar one throughout literature, but here you’ve rendered some startling, intriguing images, such as “Baby Jesus on a cross/breathing out his ghost.” How did/do you handle religion and religious imagery in this poem and your writing?

I had written three poems about Caravaggio paintings – about Santa Lucia, about St. Paul’s conversion, and oh dear, I forget the other one, anyhow these poems were a little too adoring, a little too reverential.

So I get to Venice and suddenly realize I badly need two knee replacements. There I am all day on my feet. It was always when I was really whining and moaning that I’d stumble into a church–there was once a double amputee, once someone in a wheelchair--and confront actual suffering and loss, all of us gazing at a painting or altarpiece. There were moments when my husband may have considered fed-ex’ing me home. The tone of crankiness and abruptness in the poem comes from this situation–here I have the luxury of going to Italy, but I’m in pain, complaining, and having to think about suffering on many levels.

As a liberal Episcopalian, I’m amazed by the role of the visual image in the Catholic church, its power to concentrate so much emotion. Some of the images I love, but some of this world I loathe. I’m sort of, lightly, battling with it in this poem. My parents were word people as well; they loved art, but found the spirit more through nature, poems, song and psalms, then through paintings.

This poem is from an unpublished manuscript called Wait For Me. Can you tell us more about this project?

Wait For Me is a manuscript of poems dealing with the few years after my parents and several other loved people died, a trite topic, I know. I also have some poems that are homages to the farm I grew up on, to the rural landscape that nurtured my parents’ whole lives and my childhood. I’ve lived in cities for much of my adult life, so I see this book as having elegies for the land I left, as well as for the people who have gone.

One of the poems was published in the Best of the Web, 2009.

I have a poem dealing with the burial of my father on the farm, another poem about his dementia, but mostly the book is about trying to see my parents, their whole lives, now that the pattern has filled, how they live on in me, how much I owe them, how much I’d give to have more time with them.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

See above– I have all the poems for this manuscript, I have them in five sections, I have a shape I want the book to take–not chronological– and now I keep re-arranging things, adding a poem, taking another one out, moving this one here, that one there.

What great books have you read recently? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

This summer I’m reading Charles Wright’s Sestets, Terrance Hayes Lighthead, Andrew Motion’s The Mower, Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise, dipping into Camille Dungy’s wonderful anthology, Black Nature, and re-reading Martha Rhodes Mother Quiet.

I’ve enjoyed recently published short story books of Edna O’brien and Julian Barnes. And then there’s Carmine Abate’s The Homecoming Party.  Amazing. Abate is an Italian novelist, from Calabria, writing about his family in the post-World War II years.

I keep hoping Shirley Hazzard will write another wonderful novel, and also Jane Gardham.